Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Floating Down The Boulevard

Through 5 PM, rainfall totals over the past 40 hours or so have varied wildly across the region. Some places have avoided getting an inch of rain altogether in this event, such as Allentown. Others...well...are looking at six to even more inches of rain since Monday began. Rainfall has been rather epic in Northeast Philadelphia -- 6.08" of rain since Monday morning. Parts of Burlington and Ocean Counties are pushing over seven inches of rain unofficially in the past couple of days.

The cause of this is partly the remnants of Isaac although the energy was split into pieces, one out along a cold front to our northwest, as well as the second piece working overhead. This is also due in large part to that stalled back door front that nudged down on Saturday and stalled over the Delmarva on Sunday. The front provided a boundary for tropical moisture from Isaac's circulation (not the remnant low itself) to be pulled by the remnant low over the top of the boundary. This caused rains to break out and lift northeast in repeated fashion the past 36-48 hours.

The boundary is still sorta near us and is being agitated by a piece of Isaac's "energy" working through. Dew points across the region are tropical -- 73-76 has been commonplace through the day today -- and that humidity remains with us into tomorrow before beginning to break Wednesday night into Thursday as the front slides through the region later tomorrow.

Periods of showers and storms will be possible through tonight and into tomorrow, although we will continue to have intermittent lulls and breaks in the thunderstorm activity through the night and it does appear that northern areas may be stormier than southern overall tonight. That said, more heavy rain is possible in any of these showers or storms and some places will pick up another two plus inches in the heaviest of downpours...this most likely will be to our north.